Director's Cut: No Age: "Losing Feeling"

From Bjรถrk's ["Triumph of a Heart"](http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=4230127 ""Triumph of a Heart"" ) *to Paula Abdul's ["Opposites Attract"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbknGnZXHUk ""Opposites Attract"" ), great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.
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This time, we chatted with filmmaker Gil Kenan, who helmed the playful stop-motion video for the title track from No Age's recent Losing Feeling EP. The no-budget mouse-cam clip is Kenan's first music video-- and quite a break from his recent work directing the 2006 animated feature Monster House and last year's dark fantasy flick City of Ember starring Bill Murray. He might be used to big studios and stars now, but Kenan is an L.A. punk at heart.

Watch the video and read the Q&A after the jump:

No Age: "Losing Feeling":

Pitchfork: You're a big-time feature film director. Why make this music video?

Gil Kenan: The No Age guys are really good friends of mine. I met them eight years ago when we all had just come over the hill to Los Angeles. I really wanted to make my first video for them, so when they finished recording this EP, they came over and played me this track and I fell in love with it. And I'm really good friends with Jim [Smith] who owns [L.A. club] the Smell, so I would see them there over the years. I'm really into L.A. punk stuff: Screamers, Circle Jerks, Fear.

Pitchfork: Do you still go to the Smell?

GK: Yeah, for sure. The last year and a half has been difficult because I had a baby. But she actually went to see her first show at the Smell when she was about a month old-- it was a Mika Miko/No Age daytime show.

Pitchfork: That doesn't sound like very responsible parenting.

GK: [laughs] It was pretty responsible until the homeless dude tried to pick her up.

Pitchfork: I like how the video relies entirely on this simple-yet-effective story instead of any technical doo-dads or stylistic crutches.

GK: There's a more elaborate back story that's not really necessary for the enjoyment of the video, too. It's that Dean and Randy angered one of their fans, who happened to have magical powers. She sent them a letter that was charged with a curse-- you can see the letter in some of the shots. So they opened the letter and read it and shrunk down into mice. Then they were scrambling to get this potion to turn back in time to finish the song. I was never going to shoot that introduction, but I like to have a back story. It's more just for me.

Pitchfork: How did you come up with that back story?

GK: Listening to the song, I kept hearing this girl's name: Deirdre. So she became this character who wrote the letter. I'm not sure if that's what they're actually saying in the song. A lot of times when my wife and I are singing songs out loud, I'm usually pretty confident that I know the lyrics but then I'm in a totally different universe than what they actually are.

Pitchfork: After doing these multi-million dollar movies, was something super small like this liberating or frustrating for you?

GK: It was really fun to do something so simple. And the great thing about shooting at their practice space was that I didn't need to dress any sets. It's all natural light. All I needed to do was find the right places to put the still camera to tell the story. I made the mice with this weird catnip holder I found at a pet store. My wife put some eyeballs on it. That was basically the expenditure for this thing. Fifty dollars is probably a wildly liberal estimate for the budget. It's appropriate for the No Age aesthetic. I don't really think you could get away with it for a U2 video, though.

Pitchfork: The typical wisdom is that once you get to that feature film level, music videos are somehow beneath you.

GK: Yeah, I always felt like I missed out on being able to make videos. It's a form I always really loved. I grew up watching "120 Minutes", and that was basically my first film school.